>>-snip-
>>
>>>Hello Ed!
>>>
>>>I see you are online.
>>>So, I cannot check this now, it is night here, and I almost sleep.
>>
>>Sleep? I thought they made sleep illegal...at least that's what they told me at 9:00 tonight when my boss called from work!
>>
>>>So tomorrow I will report it you.
>>
>>Thanks; it'll help to look for something that might be a clearer indication of DCOM being installed.
>
>Hello Ed!
>So, I checked the scenario. Win95 Hun version registry has no OLE section under SOFWARE/MICROSOFT. But!!!
>Today, before I write these rows, I ran again the program. Now it gives: C0000005 exception.
>
>Sorry! My program starts as you wrote with Screen OFF.
>The problem: If in a vfp program I test the registry for DCOM98 existence, and it doesnot exist, there is no mean, to avoid Exception C000005.
>(I didnot use VFP6 setup wizzard. I copied two necessary VFP DLL by hand.)

Sorry to hear that the problem did exist in other versions (but it might make me believe a bit more in what I've found to date!)

>
>I decided to write small exe in cpp, as starter program before exe setup, that will refuse to run without DCOM95 v1.2 installed.

That's a good idea; I use an installer written primarily in InstallShield that provides for split installation functionality, assuming there's enough space on the local machine; it tries to install DCOM if it doesn't find the necessary registry key and finds Win95 in place (it simply quits on NT without the registry key and/or SP3 or SP4 in place; I can't force people to run my installs from an Admin equivalent account, much less load Service Packs, and I don't know enough about the licensing and security issues after restart to include SP3 or SP4 in an install distribution.) After the split installer fires, the second half aborts if it doesn't find the needed registry key, telling the user to install the appropriate DCOM or SP patch and try again.

The canned VFP Setup Wizard install fires in the second part of my split installation script; I make sure that DCOM is in place before firing the Setup Wizard installer.

I've heard, but haven't tested, that a VFP 6 app with SCREEN=OFF in the CONFIG.FPW will run to completion if _SCREEN.Visible is never set to .T. and no top-level form is ever launched - if that's true, you could build the test into your VFP6 based launcher and use an API messagebox to display the warning before firing up a splash screen (you'll have to find a valid hWnd to use for the messagebox, since VFP with SCREEN=OFF is essentially run with a ShowWindow mode of 0, hidden and with no valid window context) and then shut down via ExitProcess() to avoid the C0000005 error. I'll play around with this later on this week when things calm down a bit at work.